The data generated and stored by the average user has grown dramatically following the digital revolution. The amount of digital files created by consumers and businesses is growing at double-digit annual rates. This information tsunami has created new challenges in data management, not only in terms of time and effort spent organizing, classifying, and discovering digital assets, but also in protecting data from accidental loss and managing security access control. Users may store critical financial information on the same storage device as family photos and work-related assets. The accessibility of various mobile devices, such as the iPhone®, has also made the generation of digital data more frequent among even inexperienced computer users. Social networking services have also spurred users to generate, share, and store a variety of different files.
Unfortunately, this plethora of data is not always organized in a manner conducive to safe and efficient management. Users may store their data in disparate locations where the data is not easily accessible, or centralize their data storage at a single location when the data would be more safely segregated among a plurality of devices. Often when a device fails, or a user loses access to a storage unit, they are without remedy. As a precaution, users must often adopt onerous personal backup habits, or create personalized scripting tools, to ensure that their data can be preserved. Since individual operating systems and hardware configurations may or may not lend themselves to the user's ad hoc solution, users must often turn to a third-party solution, such as a dedicated storage drive.
With the increasing ubiquity of data storage, however, the use of a single storage device for data replication appears increasingly inefficient. The typical home or office network may contain dozens of different computing devices, each possessing a myriad of different storage systems and capabilities. Ideally, a user could take advantage of this untapped resource to replicate and store their data across a distributed collection of storage devices.
Taking advantage of these disparate devices' resources is not easy. The topology of modern networks and the diversity of operating systems and hardware standards generally renders distributed replication unfeasible. Each computer device on a home or office network may have intermittent availability and may join and leave the network at unpredictable times, e.g. as a mobile phone is taken to work, as a laptop is brought home from school, as a Universal Serial Bus (USB) storage device is removed from a computer, etc. The devices may have a plurality of different partitions, with each partition servicing a different file system type. Confronted with these obstacles, users have often relied on a single external drive for their storage backup, and left the distributed resources of their multiple devices on their networks untapped.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a system capable of providing file replication and management across a plurality of devices in a dynamic network environment.